ABOUT THE BOOK:
THE TRAVELER
(literally
Traveler and the Moonlight
) by Antal Szerb (1937), translated from the Hungarian by Peter Hargitai, recounts the misadventures of a sexually ambiguous intellectual forced to fit into a life of conventional morality and its notions of manhood. Thirty-six-year-old Mihály takes his new bride to Italy for their honeymoon, where he accidentally hops on the wrong rail car. As his wife continues on toward Rome, he heads in the opposite direction, on the run from his ill-starred honeymoon. What he longs for are the heydays of his youth when the sexes blurred in a state of blissful androgyny, and he and his eccentric friends, male and female, could take turns falling in and out of love with each other. Mihály was in love with his best friend Tamás and his sister Éva, a gothic femme fatale who delighted in egging them on to the death. Mihály misses their "games" in which sex and death combined to take center stage. Obsessed with these fantasies, he wanders from Perugia to Rome in pursuit of acting out in real time his fatally erotic destiny. Set in Europe during the rise of Fascism, Mihály's feverish mind amps up to visionary intensity that only now can we appreciate. As he teeters on the brink of his abyss, he is eerily prophetic of one of the darkest periods in human history, the world war, his own death, and our own emerging culture of hate that threatens to destroy people for who they are and how they express themselves. Because of his Jewish background, Antal Szerb had been banned from publishing in Hungary and from traveling to Italy. He was sent instead to a forced labor camp where Nazi guards beat him to death before tossing his body into a mass grave on January 27, 1945.